How Rewards Can Backfire and Reduce Motivation

This is an article that I found on psychblog. It happened to be very interesting to me. These two professors took 51 pre-schoolers between the ages of 3 and 4, they wanted to know if the kids would draw pictures better if they were given a reward, not given a reward, or give them a reward but not until the end would make a difference. In this study they took each pre-schooler one by one into a room for 6 mins. After about 3 days they did it again and compared data. The data showed that kids proform better if they draw first and then get a reward. The kids that knew they were getting a reward didn't have good preformence with the pictures. The kids that knew they weren't getting a reward did almost as well as the ones that didn't know they were getting a reward until after.

This study shows that giving rewards to kids isn't always the best thing to do. If they know already that they are getting a reward they don't have to worry if they did good or bad. This reminds me of my team. There is this one girl on there that knows she is going to get to play no matter what. So, she doesn't have to worry about screwing up of giving up a lot of points because she isn't going to go out of the game because of it. It sucks because she has a really bad additude too, I think it has something to do with that she knows she is going to get to play no matter what and she doesn't care.